Deep, wide-field imaging surveys are the most efficient means to
detect large numbers of galaxy clusters. Upcoming large photometric
surveys therefore hold great potential for constraining cosmology by
measuring the evolution of the cluster mass function. The Dark Energy
Survey (DES) will survey 5000 square degrees of the southern sky,
yielding hundreds of thousands of galaxy clusters out to z~1.3. For
the full statistical power of this sample to be realized, it is
essential to accurately characterize the completeness, purity,
mass-observable relation, and selection function of the observed
cluster catalog. Each of these quantities depends sensitively on the
method used to detect clusters in the photometric data, so great care
must be taken in the development and calibration of cluster-finding
algorithms. In this talk I will first give a brief overview of DES
and its potential for cluster cosmology. I will then present the
first results from the DES cluster-finder comparison project, which
establishes a framework for testing, calibrating, and comparing a wide
array of cluster-finders and assessing their usefulness for
cosmological tests. I will also describe near-term plans for using
this framework to perform a fully blind cosmological analysis on
simulated data in advance of the first-year DES data.
View poster as pdf.